


How To Torment Cats (And Witchers)

by BenevolentErrancy



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types, Wiedźmin | The Witcher Series - Andrzej Sapkowski
Genre: Fluff, Found Family, Gen, Kaer Morhen, Witchers Are Cats, Young Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:00:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23645020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BenevolentErrancy/pseuds/BenevolentErrancy
Summary: Seeing Geralt fast asleep on the floor reminds Dandelion of a game he used to play with his mother's cat when he was young. And well, it's not like him and Ciri are doing anything else right now. It's practically a training exercise, Geralt should thank him.
Relationships: Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon & Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon & Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia & Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 99
Kudos: 1208





	How To Torment Cats (And Witchers)

**Author's Note:**

> One more short ficlet because I've apparently lost control of my life today. Written in a couple hours, no beta we die like men.
> 
> A kinkmeme fill: https://witcherkinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/429.html?thread=253869#cmt253869  
> On the meme I used the name "Jaskier" instead of Dandelion so it was at least somewhat more show compliant because I don't actually know how much people want something with a book canon lean being posted there. So if you prefer reading the name Jaskier over Dandelion, go there I guess, though nothing else is changed.

“Does it count if he’s sleeping?”

Dandelion nearly jumped out of his skin, even if the voice was so quiet it was more a breath than a whisper. He had been half-asleep himself, eyes drooping over the book he was reading, and hadn’t been prepared for a head of fly-away hair to pop up next to his elbow. Ciri, who had definitely not been there a minute ago, was crouching next to the chair he was curled up in, looking like a cougar about to pounce. It took Dandelion a couple seconds for his brain to make sense of what she was saying, and then his eyes followed hers across the room.

It had just been himself, Geralt, and Eskel in here until Ciri arrived. He himself was tucked up in a chair under a pelt of some sort next to the room’s wall of tall windows. These windows actually had glass, and it allowed him to desperately soak up whatever little sunlight he could get. The sun set obnoxiously early this deep into the winter, and Kaer Morhen being tucked away in a mountain valley did nothing to help; it felt like it had barely cracked noon by the time the sun was already disappearing behind the next mountain. And Dandelion, rather like his namesake, swore he could feel himself positively drooping from the deprivation, so he eagerly found the sunniest spot in the room to read by.

Eskel and Geralt didn’t share that concern. They had previously both been spread out on the floor playing round after round of gwent, Geralt’s Northern Realm deck struggling to fight back the hoards of Eskel’s stacked Monster deck. Perhaps Dandelion hadn’t been as alert as he had thought, because at some point the games had ended, and Eskel was now sitting on the sofa along the opposite wall, making use of the remaining sunlight to stitch a basketful of tattered clothes. Geralt, on the other hand, was still sprawled across the floor, head pillowed in his arms, apparently fast asleep.

Ciri peered up at him, questioning.

Dandelion shrugged, helplessly. He really couldn’t guess at the rules to Ciri and Geralt’s strange game. Or Ciri’s game, at the very least. Geralt had spent the past few weeks berating her on her footing and how she carried herself, trying to teach her to soften her steps and quiet her approach. Ciri, lion cub that she was, had taken it as a challenge, and had spent these past couple weeks doing everything she could to sneak up on Geralt, to little avail. Any time she pounced out at him, Geralt was already turning to either catch her, if he was feeling playful and generous, or to sidestep and let her try to recover from her failed attack herself.

“It should count, right?” Ciri whispered. “He let his guard down, right?”

Dandelion tried to hold back his grin. He could see Eskel doing the same from the corner of his eye.

“Regardless,” he whispered back, “I’m not sure I’d jump on a sleeping witcher’s back if I were you. I can’t see that ending well for any of us. I’d hate to have to go find you among the buttresses after Geralt accidentally tosses you out the window. Just think of how cross he would be, he’d be useless for the rest of the evening certainly.”

Ciri frowned at that, considering. Dandelion bit his lip to resist the urge to laugh out loud at the thought of Geralt’s face when he woke up to a child landing bodily on top of him. That would definitely wake Geralt up. And he had the strange compulsion to ensure that didn’t happen. He felt strangely like he was back at his family’s estate with his mother’s temperamental cat in his lap, afraid to do anything that would cause it to wake.

And that sparked another thought.

“You know what we  _ could _ do though?” he whispered to Ciri. “But it might be risky…”

Ciri looked up at him with what he considered her “baby witcher” face. The very implication that something might be too scary for her had already made up her mind that whatever it was, she was going to be a part of it.

That was what led them to the position they were currently in. See, his mother’s cat, fat, lazy thing that it was, would invariably fall asleep in any convenient sunny patch, and Dandelion, then Julian, would gleefully see how many nearby objects he could stack on the cat before it woke up and attempted to claw at him from under a pile of papers and riding gloves and goblets.

It wasn’t so much different with Geralt, except that they had more surface area to work with, and the stakes felt significantly higher. For one, Dandelion was sleeping in Geralt's bed on account of Kaer Morhen being an unforgivably cold wasteland at night and Triss already having the best room in the keep. He did not relish the thought of being exiled from his witcher-shaped bed-warmer, forced to brave a cold bed on his own. For another, he was confident that if Geralt woke up under an undignified pile of detritus he  _ was _ capable of tossing both him and Ciri if not out the window then at least across the room. Or forcing them to run laps on the Killer until either his temper subsided (unlikely) or until one of them died on that damn path (significantly more likely, at least in Dandelion’s case. Ciri would be fine.)

Dandelion held his breath while Ciri tried to resist sniggering as she very carefully angled the last two Torrential Rain cards onto the top of her card house. So far they had stacked a row of books along Geralt’s back, three deep, to give themselves a slightly flatter surface to work on. From there they had pilfered Geralt’s gwent deck (not Eskel’s, on account of him still looking up from his stitching from time to time to smirk at them) and built the tallest house of cards they dared. 

Along with that, there was also a stack of pillows from the sofa balanced on Geralt’s shoulder blades, with a small army of mugs arranged precariously on top of the plush, shifting surface. Dandelion’s lute rested on his legs, at the curse of his knees, and his plumed cap sat jauntily on Geralt’s head. The plum bonnet was a bright and comical sight against Geralt’s sprawled, white hair and Dandelion swore he would do anything in his power to get the thing on Geralt's head again when the man was conscious. Dandelion and Ciri had also managed to arrange their boots on Geralt’s calves to create a small leather mountain with the room’s unlit candelabra wobbling at its peak.

As they ran out of objects in the room to use, Dandelion had pulled some of his precious paper out from his lute case. What he would normally use to write down song or story ideas was now being sacrificed for a much more noble purpose. He’d torn up the paper into smaller squares and then silently attempted to teach Ciri how to fold it into tiny paper birds. Those birds were now perched every where there was a free space: along the edge of the books like vanguards, on top of the mugs on the pillow tower, one on each of Geralt’s heels, up Geralt’s neck, and of course nesting in Dandelion’s bonnet like a flock of deranged geese.

“What next?” Ciri whispered, breathless from withheld laughter, as she placed the last bird on Geralt’s unoccupied elbow..

Dandelion was considering this when Eskel gestured, catching his eye. Eskel pointed into the basket he’d been pulling his mending from. Heart pounding, Dandelion tiptoed over, hardly daring to believe they had gotten away with this for so long and fearful of testing his luck now. Peeking into the nearly empty basket, he wasn’t sure what to make of what he saw.

“What is it?” hissed Ciri.

Dandelion held up the long stips plain, frayed linen. They looked like scraps, possibly used for patching or fortifying seams. He shrugged and gave Eskel an inquisitive look.

Eskel mimed doing something with his fingers.

Dandelion pulled a face and shook his head. He had no idea what Eskel was on about. Ciri, however, inhaled sharply, hands slapping over his mouth to hide her delighted grin as she understood. She made grabby hands until Eskel reached down, balled up the scraps, and tossed them over to Ciri. Dandelion’s heart nearly stopped watching the trajectory — if Ciri missed it would smack right into the pillow tower, and if that fell it would bring a rain of mugs down on Geralt’s head and Geralt’s wrathe down on the rest of them.

Fortunately Ciri’s reflexes were much better than Dandelion’s, presumably from months of training under the critical eyes of the witchers.

The child spread them out before her, picked one up, and immediately Dandelion realized what Eskel had meant. Ciri took a random clump of hair and, as delicately as she could, tied the linen strip into a bow.

Dandelion had to curl in on himself and bite his lip to keep from wheezing with laughter. Then he crawled over to Ciri, took a handful of strips, and snuck to Geralt’s other side where he began the same process. Truly, Geralt must have been exhausted for him to still be asleep while Dandelion and Ciri fingered his hair, separating it into little bundles to be tied off. He had slept with Geralt enough to know that it didn’t take much to find a pair of glowing cat eyes staring at you from the dark. Still, Dandelion was not the sort of person to look a gift horse (or a sleeping witcher) in the mouth.

The only thing he would regret was that there was no way to immortalize this moment of Geralt buried under all and sundry that was found in the little sitting room, hair done up like a babe’s doll. He wondered if Triss had any spells that could capture this scene and if he would have time to run and grab her.

All of a sudden Geralt’s back shook, making the pillows judder on his shoulders and the house of cards tremble, threatening to tip.

“Ah!” Ciri gasped, jerking her hands back. Dandelion did the same, heart thundering, sure that this was the moment that Geralt woke and caught them. The shaking stilled. Geralt’s back had resumed its steady tempo as it raised and lowered, slow with sleep.

He could hear Eskel practically wheeze from where he was sitting; he tried to shoot the witcher a warning look that informed him there was nothing funny about how close he and Ciri had come to peril, thank you very much.

After a minute of waiting to see if it was truly safe or if Geralt was indeed stirring, Ciri tentatively picked up another strip and reached for the witcher’s hair again. He was still. Dandelion followed her lead, moving even slower as he attached more strips to the white hair. It was getting harder to gather hair that hadn’t already been tied up though, and he was needing to more frequently brush his fingers through it to gather enough.

The shaking returned, this time with a deep rumble that Dandelion was _ positive _ was Geralt growling with realization. He jerked back along with Ciri. The rumbling continued, but when Geralt still didn’t move, Dandelion was struck by a sudden realization. He crept closer once more, placing his hand back against Geralt's head and running his finger through his hair as if he were trying to make another ponytail. Ciri shot him panicked looks, trying to warn him to back off and let the witcher settle into sleep once again, but Dandelion was willing to risk things for this experiment. The soft rumbling continued, coming from somewhere deep in Geralt’s chest. A deep noise to be sure, almost like contained thunder, but not as threatening as it had first sounded. Though it was still a powerful enough rumble that it made everything so precariously balanced along him jitter, but not quite enough to make anything fall.

“You’ll wake him up,” Ciri hissed at him.

“Oh,” said Eskel, his voice suddenly back up to a conversational level, making Dandelion and Ciri freeze with shock and terror, “he’s been awake since Ciri entered the room.”

Geralt moved so fast, Dandelion didn’t even have a chance to work up a proper scream before he was rising from beneath the debris like a kraken from the depths of the sea. Geralt bellowed like a demon. Dandelion and Ciri shrieked as they slipped and scampered to their feet, bolting for the door.

Like a wolf, Geralt lunged at the pair of them, and Dandelion let out another high pitched scream as he felt himself get tackled from behind — the scream cut abruptly short as he crashed against the hardwood floor and all of his breath was forcefully knocked from his body. After a stunt like that, Dandelion may be gasping for air, but Geralt didn’t even pause, his hand shooting out like a serpent to grab Ciri’s ankle and whip her feet out from under her so that she was also crashing down into a screaming, laughing pile of limbs next to Dandelion’s head.

“I have a golden dragon card in that deck, and if either of you bent it I’ll take you outside and dunk you in the lake,” Geralt threatened.

Dandelion fully believed that. So, it seemed, did Ciri for she writhed and kicked, laughter and shrieks blending into each other as she tried to free herself, giving Dandelion a good kick in the process. While Geralt had his hands full trying to contain Ciri’s thrashing legs — and digging his fingers behind her knees in a spot that was clearly ticklish because she was dissolving into breathless hysterics — Dandelion took his chance to escape. He twisted beneath Geralt’s body, trying to squirm out from under the man’s weight, but only succeeded in flopping from his front onto his back by the time Geralt caught on. Before Dandelion could get his legs free the witcher had rearranged himself so that he was now sitting on Dandelion’s stomach.

Geralt was now dragging Ciri towards him, like a man reeling in a fish on a line, hand over hand. Dandelion said a prayer to Melitele but accepted his fate. If he must go down, perhaps he may at least save his partner in crime. So he jerked up in so much as his body would allow and did the only thing he could think of that could even possibly distract a witcher, a tried-and-true battle tactic from his youth among his various cousins: he managed to catch hold of Geralt’s elbow and licked it, dragging his full tongue as fully and wetly as he could across the bare skin.

“ _Eugh!_ _Dandelion!_ ” Geralt spat, disgusted, jerking back. It was enough though that Ciri was able to kick her small ankle loose and bolt once more for the door.

“What the  _ fuck  _ is going on in here?” asked Lambert appearing in the doorway. “Has Geralt finally snapped and decided to murder that bard? We heard the screaming all the way from—  _ what  _ have you done to this room?”

Ciri didn’t even hesitate. In a move that Eskel and Geralt surely must be proud of, Ciri dropped to the ground, slid between Lambert’s legs, and was back on her feet and disappearing down the hall before the man even seemed to realize what was happening.

Lambert stared open mouthed at all of them. “What the  _ fuck _ ,” he repeated, but was drowned out by Eskel, who had dissolved into a fit of laughter. Even Geralt was grinning up at Lambert’s baffled, annoyed face.

“Hey, Geralt,” said Dandelion from where he lay pinned on the ground. “Did you know you  _ purr _ ?”

Dandelion was punished by getting his bonnet shoved into his face, but he also got to hear Geralt’s laughter so he counted it as a win.


End file.
